Ask any small business owner how hiring is going and you’ll usually get a sigh before you get an answer.
When I sat down with Doug Levy, a former COO who has managed hundreds of hires over 20+ years, I asked how a business knows it has a hiring problem. His answer was simple. They just do. Growth brings hiring problems with it, as reliably as death and taxes.
This was a powerful conversation and if you haven’t watched it yet, go check out the video. The challenges are real, and they cost more than most leaders realize. The good news is that most of them trace back to one fixable gap.
The Problem Starts Before the First Interview
Most hiring processes have no objective way to measure a candidate. There are no defined criteria, no weighting and no scoring method agreed on before the resumes arrive. Every decision rests on personal judgment.
Personal judgment moves around. It shifts with your mood, your workload and how many applications you’ve already read that day. Doug put it plainly in our conversation: the way you evaluate the first resume is different from the way you evaluate the 150th.
The interview adds another layer. Twenty minutes of great rapport feels like proof, yet rapport only tells you how someone performs in a conversation with you. It says very little about how they’ll operate in the role six months from now. An interview is a first date, and plenty of great first dates never turn into great marriages.
What a Bad Hire Really Costs
Doug gave us the math on this in our conversation. Department of Labor and SHRM estimates put the cost of a failed hire anywhere from 30% to 200% of salary. Doug lands on a realistic 80%.
Hire someone at $60,000 a year who fails after six months, and you’ve lost roughly $54,000. That only covers lost productivity during a ramp-up that never finished, but doesn’t cover manager hours spent correcting performance, the drag on peers picking up the slack, and the cost of filling the seat all over again.
Then there’s the uncalculated cost of stalled projects, a dip in morale, and the top performer who quietly started taking recruiter calls.
A bad hire can also look productive. The salesperson who closes every deal while demoralizing everyone around them counts as a bad hire too because, when great people leave because of someone you tolerate, that’s a hiring cost.
Why the Usual Fixes Don’t Stick
When a hire goes wrong, most businesses try to patch the process. They add a few culture questions to the interview or tweak the job ad. Doug called it the same show on repeat. One mistake gets fixed and another surfaces, because the foundation underneath never changed.
Confirmation bias keeps the cycle running, especially when one rock star hire becomes evidence that the gut they used to hire them works, even when the turnover numbers tell a different story.
AI screening hasn’t solved it either. If the job ad was copied from another company’s posting and the role was never clearly defined, the AI is screening against the wrong target. When using AI, if you feed it garbage, it’s going to give you garbage right back, but now at scale. With AI screening tools, the data proves that qualified candidates are being auto-rejected within moments of the application, and some of these systems, as I have reported in previous blogs, hold on to those rejections for up to a year, so even if you apply for a different role, you’re auto-rejected.
What Changes With a Real Process
Doug built the Right Hire Method to protect your judgment. It’s a seven-step process that makes you prove each step worked before moving to the next. A few of the shifts make an immediate difference. First 5 steps:
- Design the role before you write the ad. You can’t attract the right person to a job you haven’t completely defined.
- Decide how you’ll score resumes before you read them. Weight what matters for this specific role. Doug’s favorite story involves a client who nearly trashed a resume full of grammar errors. They immediately rejected it even for a role meant for a massage therapist.
- Ask about real past experience. Hypothetical questions invite rehearsed answers, so have candidates walk you through what they actually did in a specific situation.
- Score first, talk second. After an interview, each interviewer scores independently and shares numbers before anyone says “I loved them.” An opinion shared too early poisons the well.
- Keep the room small. In a business under 50 employees, Doug rarely sees a reason for more than three people on the hiring team, and peers shouldn’t be among them.
When every candidate is measured with the same yardstick, hiring becomes consistent. Consistency makes it repeatable, and a repeatable process can finally run without the owner sitting in every interview.
Where Assessments Fit
This is where Doug’s work and mine overlap. A resume can be embellished and an interview staged but the right assessments can give you objective data to evaluate. In my work, we look at the three parts of the mind when evaluating hires to ensure they are aligned to the role.
- Cognitive: what someone knows, has learned and can do. A resume typically speaks to this, though it’s really a marketing document.
- Affective: what drives them, including their attitudes and preferences.
- Conative: how they naturally take action when they work. This is the part that shows how someone will actually operate inside the role.
Most hiring processes measure only the first one, using the candidate’s own sales pitch as the data. Validated assessments give you objective insight into the rest, and that insight shapes sharper interview questions. Choose tools validated for hiring, since many popular assessments aren’t, and using them opens compliance risk you don’t need.
The same data keeps working after the offer is signed. It shows you how to onboard and set a new hire up to perform and where friction is likely to show up on the team.
Slow Down to Speed Up
The biggest pushback Doug hears is time. Building a process feels slower than posting the job and hoping for the best, and at the start it is. That upfront time saves you months of managing the wrong person and starting the search over.
If you’re hiring in the next 90 days, or someone you hired this year has already walked out the door, take a hard look at your process before you repeat a very expensive mistake. Check out this website below and make sure to tell them you learned about it from this blog.
- Watch my full conversation with Doug: https://audaciousconceptsinc.com
- Learn more about the Right Hire Method at therighthiremethod.com
- For help using assessments to hire well and understand what’s driving performance on your team, reach out at audaciousconceptsinc.com